Another busy week this week - podcasting, streaming and trying not to spend all my time over-thinking SEO. I kept myself busy but still found the time to get through a podcast or two.

Topics for this week:

• Divs and Devs

• Building a Sales Team

• Businesses That Always Fail

• 10 Years to $4 Billion

• The Pro Newsletter Meta

Divs and Devs

I like how divs.design turned out on my first attempt, but I’m in the process of redesigning it to be more clear about what a customer is signing up for while also trying to naturally weave in SEO terms. Once I’ve established a reputation, I’ll shoot for getting divs an Awwward, but for now the goal is clarity over design - remove the friction.

On Thursday, I ended up multi-streaming some of that redesign work on YouTube, Twitch and X at the same time! One stream a week has been realistic but I’d like to bump that up as I get in the groove. And I haven’t chopped the video up into smaller chunks yet unfortunately, so it’s still a 2 hour block, but feel free to skip around! I mostly focused on the navigation bar and adding a fancy underline effect to all the links. Or you can skip the videos and see a preview here instead.

And lastly, Episode 4 of The Dev Sync published Monday, chatting about Frameworks and First Jobs. A few people have said we have a good dynamic which is encouraging to hear, and that’s feedback from other people, not just my parents! If you give it a listen, leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Building A Sales Team

I don’t need a sales team yet, but it was fascinating to hear how Alex Hormozi explained his process for building a sales team from scratch.

His counter-intuitive pro-tip was no primma donnas. You would think you’d want to keep the sales person doing 50% of the sales, but if they’re not following the proper processes like everyone else, they are actually going to create a negative impact on the team and business. And even from a mathematical stand point, that leader is most likely taking sales from the rest of the pool, making the business less efficient overall.

The other quick takeaway that was simple, but blew my non-sales mind, was that sales people shouldn’t repeat the pitch, they should resolve concerns. The web page or video should explain the product or service, the sales closer is there to answer any questions that weren’t addressed. It’s obvious now, but it’s not my first thought of what sales people do.

As always, the rest of the video is worth a watch if you find yourself looking to build a sales team, or just learn how a sales team would work:

Business That Always Fail

Codie Sanchez has been on a roll with quality content lately, and I had to check this one to make sure I’m not planning on creating a business that has a low chance of succeeding.

Here’s the list of businesses she recommends avoiding:

• Gyms (sorry Alex Hormozi)

• ATMs

• Dry Cleaning

• Hotels

• Amazon FBA

• Retail Stores

• Restaurants

I’m not surprised by this list, all of these have a number of factors that are out of the owners control, so you’re constantly at the mercy of the market. And that seem to back that up with high failure rates.

On the flip side, businesses she does recommend:

• Trucking (Last Mile Delivery)

• Senior Care (if you’re cold and heartless)

• Real Estate

• Laundromats

Luckily I cleared the list, I believe she does have some involvement in software but it’s not her specialty so it didn’t make the list, whether that’s good or bad.

The entire video is worth the time, she backs up all of these items with some numbers which I always appreciate. See all the stats below:

10 Years to $4 Billion

Webflow is my tool of choice for building websites, but surprisingly I didn’t know much about how it came to be. It’s a passion project from the founder Vlad Magdalin who worked more than a decade to make it a successful product. He had a number of road blocks and stops and starts, but he kept coming back to it and pushing, finally leading to a $4 billion valuation at the end of 2023. 

Can’t help but come back to the Bill Gates quote, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

Vlad’s full story on how he built Webflow below:

The Pro Newsletter Meta

I’ve been on a My First Million podcast kick lately, and YouTube served up a great conversation between Sam Parr and Jason Lemkin primarily talking about SaaS and building successful companies to Exit, which I was also interested in, but Sam ended up revealing his take on how to grow newsletters to $100 million.

That’s not exactly my plan for this newsletter, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared. The steps he outlined were:

• grow organically to 100,000 subscribers

• start paid marketing to get to multiple million subscribers

• establish brand name recognition for regular traffic

• after a few years reduce or quit advertising to stabilize subscribers

• maintain around 3.5 million subscribers

• launch additional newsletters and repeat the steps

Big numbers and big time lines but interesting to hear the strategy of the newsletter pros. Not sure I’ll be deploying these tactics anytime soon unless you want to tell 100,000 of your closest friends to sign up so we can test this out.

And one non-newsletter bonus tip that Jason threw in from his SaaS experience: the second product should always be bigger than the first. It’s hard to catch up when you have a large scale customer-base but your product doesn’t make enough profit to keep up scaling and operations, so the second product should make up the difference. Another gem I’ll be saving for later.

Their full conversation is just short of 45 minutes, but full of value:

And that’s it for this week! All kinds of business related pro tips from a number of pros.

Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I personally worked on.

If you want to start a newsletter like this on beehiiv and support me in the process, here’s my referral link: https://www.beehiiv.com/?via=jay-peters. Otherwise, let me know what you think at @jaypetersdotdev or email [email protected], I’d love to hear your feedback. Thanks for reading!